


Black Ruhk in a Single Serving

by dragonofeternal



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Drabble Collection, M/M, multiple AUs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 02:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6835963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofeternal/pseuds/dragonofeternal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various drabbles and flash fic about Judal and Hakuryuu, canon and au. Largely collected from askbox drabbles and used as a playground for different settings and ideas that I might not get to experiment with otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wrong Bus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SetsuntaMew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SetsuntaMew/gifts), [EthanolMusket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EthanolMusket/gifts), [orsaverba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orsaverba/gifts), [yucc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yucc/gifts), [nocturnalboys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocturnalboys/gifts).



Hakuryuu's brow furrowed as the bus finally pulled up to the station. Southbound. The other people waiting with their luggage got up, stretched, murmuring noises of 'finally' and 'good, good' as they collected their things and arranged themselves into a vague approximation of a line. But Hakuryuu stayed fixed, stuck on that word. Southbound. 

"E-excuse me," he finally said, grabbing another passenger by the arm. "I thought this bus was supposed to be going north." 

The man shook his arm free. "No it isn't. Northbound picks up on the other side of town."

Hakuryuu felt his face crumble. "But I'm supposed to- it's half an hour late already. I'll miss my connector. I-I need to take that bus. I don't-" The man was turning away, leaving Hakuryuu standing with his luggage. "I was supposed to take it, and then transfer to…."

Stupid. His bus wasn't late. It had already come and gone, all the way on the other side of town. His face and eyes were hot with the threat of tears as he watched all the other people load themselves inside. The driver glanced at him, eyebrows raised, but Hakuryuu just shook his head, unable to find the words to reply. The driver shrugged and piled in after the passengers, and the bus slowly pulled away. 

"Wait!" Someone shouted from the other side of the terminal. "No! Shit, no, wait!" Hakuryuu turned to see a man about his age running up towards him. Ah. He was chasing the bus. "Fucking- god dammit don't just drive off!" Hakuryuu turned to look at the bus now, which was far from 'driving off'-- it had already gone. _"Fuuuuuuuck….."_ The man slowed as he came up by Hakuryuu. "I was this fucking close!" He threw his backpack down, pacing, and Hakuryuu stood there, quietly, politely, staring at the man's bag and uncertain what to say to comfort him. "Book this shit way the fuck in advance, and it fucking drives off without me. Just. Fuck!" He sighed heavily and turned around, finally noticing Hakuryuu. "Oh, shit! You miss the bus too?"


	2. Are you jealous?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally published on 4/20/16, for an anon's askbox prompt: "Wait a minute. Are you jealous?"

“Oh, and this is where it gets really exciting!” Judal yammered, sawing the air with a hand. “Cuz that’s when Sinbad burst in through the stain glass window on a rope- don’t ask me where he got a rope- and cut off our escape! And, man, I was not about to have any of _that!_ So I brandish my wand, but before I get a single spell out, he’s in Baal equip and has me pinned to the wall! And look, I appreciate a good-looking guy dressed in nothing but jewelry and magic as much as the next red-blooded guy, but this is seriously pissing me off so I-”

Hakuryuu scowled and gripped his brush harder. The tension was no good- it made his calligraphy look like garbage. There was no way he could show this to his teachers. It was just impossible to stay focused when Judal was prattling on so incessantly about Sinbad and his rippling muscles. 

“Lord Magi,” he said, looking up in annoyance, “if you’re just going to sit here and bother me with your inane stories about your silly little adventures abroad, then… then go find someone else to bother!” 

Judal started a little, and then, noticing a blush across Hakuryuu’s cheeks, he broke into a wide, devilish grin. “Wait a minute… are you jealous?!”


	3. Fragmentary Smile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally published 4/20/16 for setsuntamew, with the prompt “Have I entered an alternate universe or did you really just crack a smile for me?”

The ruhk flows through everything, guiding along paths seen and unseen, mysterious and mundane. Judal hears it in his peaceful moments, feels it in his restless ones.

_Sand grits in his teeth, in his clothes, in the air. Hakuryuu is a traveler from a strange land, draped in silks and finery too heavy for the hot desert air. Judal can see the sweat beading on his forehead when he rises from his deep bow. He has come a long way, he explains, to seek help._

_Judal knows the story without needing to hear it and waves his hand to silence him. His mother, of course, for what good would a mage be if he had not already foreseen something so simple as this? He offers his hand and his aid, and Hakuryuu takes them both grimly, without a smile._

Judal blinks his eyes open and is somewhere else. Each world is fragmentary, to the point where waking and dreaming seem one and the same. In a deep emerald wood, he gives Hakuryuu an apple for the same purpose that he gave his personal aide before. He can’t bear to see how this one ends. There’s something cursed in Hakuryuu’s heart, like a black barb waiting to pierce him through. Judal dreams to end it. Or, perhaps, just wakes.

_The world is the sky as Hakuryuu kisses tears from Judal’s eyes. Why is he crying? Why do Hakuryuu’s arms around him feel so final, so grim? They stand on a tower of glass, and they are old, and the world is old. Everything shakes, and roars, and Hakuryuu is the one who shuts his eyes first._

He opens his eyes to a fist in his mouth. He’s a brat tousling on the hot tarmac with Hakuryuu, over some slight that was probably his doing. Getting punched a second time brings back more. He called Hakuryuu a crybaby, which is definitely true, and then he took his lunch, which was probably necessary and now Hakuryuu has him pinned, tears in his eyes and fire in his throat. 

_Judal is a juggler with painted hands who watches Hakuryuu from afar. Burns are made beautiful with meticulous ink, he makes a sideshow of himself, a sideshow who is not named Hakuryuu, who is not known as a missing heir, who does not make clear his purpose in travelling. The ink transforms his mottled skin to scales that match his name, and he is a dragon man that people pay to gaze upon._

_Even if Hakuryuu doesn’t give him a kind look here, even if he can’t smile, they share ambitions. It’s a good world. One he comes to time and time again. Still, he can’t shake the feeling of impending disaster. He never stays long._

Hakuryuu throws a peach at him, and Judal’s so stunned he misses it, almost falling from the tree in an attempt to catch it.

“Daydreaming, High Priest?” Hakuryuu laughs with a wry smile. 

And that look, that rare and perfect smile, is all that Judal has searched for. He wants to bottle it, drink it, keep it inside him forever. 

Instead, Judal sneers, embarassed, and teases him. “You know, you’re almost cute when you smile!”


	4. Terrified

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally published on 4/20/16, for EthanolMusket, with the prompt "I think I’m in love with you and I’m terrified.”

“Judal? Are you going to say anything?” 

Judal flashes Hakuryuu a smile that’s all teeth, a predator’s smile to hide the butterflies in his stomach. “Ah? Well what do you even want me to say?” 

Hakuryuu’s shoulders hunch, and he scowls. “Oh. I.” He turns away before Judal can see how red his face is. “I just. I thought that maybe you would have something to say to me saying that I think I’ve fallen in love with you. You only-” Judal interrupts with a harsh, barking laugh that makes Hakuryuu flinch. “Nevermind. I get it. I was right to be nervous about this, you obviously just see this as some sort of game. Forget I said anything.” 

Judal tilts his head to the side, grin still fixed in place. How do you respond ‘I love you too’ when the very idea of being loved terrifies you to your core?


	5. Wrong Bus: An Alternate Retelling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not so much a drabble in its own write as a little self-mocking joke written after I accidentally posted Wrong Bus to my tumblr with tags warning for canniblism and explicit content.

The bus swallows them whole. Judal says something simultaneously witty and asinine. There’s some sort of too-long sentence juxtaposing violent imagery with erotic or emotional intimacy. The fic probably takes itself a bit too seriously, but dammit, you deserve to be invested in this cannibal bus. It ends pretty much happily or at least happily-for-now.


	6. Any last words?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for SetsuntaMew, with for the prompt "Any last words?"  
> I'm actually pretty happy with this one, and I feel like it might have a future as a full fledged fic some day... I have another, unfinished fic that plays with similar ideas, and I feel like they could meld pretty well... *sigh* maybe someday...

“Well?” Hakuyuu panted, spear leveled at the still-grinning sorcerer’s throat. “Do you have anything to say before I finish you?” And the sorcerer, damn him, just laughed, laughed so hard that black blood bubbled from his mouth from the force of it, as though he was drowning from the inside. “I’m surprised you still have the strength to speak.” 

The sorcerer tugged experimentally at one of the magic jamming arrows lodged in his shoulder. It crackled at his touch and did not budge. “Hmmm… Well, I guess I should use my last words in this body to congratulate you on your little trap here! Anti-magic arrows, binding wards, the whole nine yards! All to take out little ol’ me. I’m touched, really.”

Hakuryuu scowled. “That’s enough out of you.” With a flash of steel and a twist of his wrists, his spear slashed the sorcerer’s head nearly off. His body slumped forward, black blood gushing over Hakuryuu’s wards, muddying the ink… Hakuryuu sighed, content that it was over, and turned to try and leave.

His foot caught on the half-step, magic seizing his body in place. 

Hakuryuu whipped his head back, realizing in a horrifying instant, his mistake. Never trust a practitioner of the black arts to stay properly dead. The sorcerer’s blood ran in rivulets into its own circle of power, magic leaping up before Hakuryuu had a chance to counter it, coursing in through the gash in his arm. 

_Of course, I’m not the type to have lame last words like that. Name’s Judal, and I think I’m gonna be quite comfy here._


	7. Method to Your Madness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for OrsaVerba, with the prompt Victorian AU + "A method to your madness." Warning for period typical slurs.

“You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?” Judal said as he dropped the curtain of Hakuryuu’s cramped boarding house room. “The cane, the limp, the missing hand… it’s a pretty thorough act, I must say.” 

“I don’t quite understand your meaning.” Hakuryuu leaned heavily on his cane to rise from his chair and gesture to the door. “But I do not appreciate your implication. I do not need to be interrogated by some rat who skulks around the East End looking for scraps that the bigger rats might deign to share with him.” 

Judal chuckled. “Oh, I’m a rat am I? Not you, who’s feigning being a cripple so you can live in the lap of luxury like this?” 

Hakuryuu’s face flushed with indignation. “Sir, I do not-” Judal interrupted with a sweep of his leg, knocking Hakuryuu’s cane and sending him tumbling forward, until-

Hakuryuu staggered a few steps forward, clutching at Judal’s lapels with both his real hand and his false one, his face flushed with rage and his eyes just as red. The momentum, whether of the fall or of Hakuryuu’s emotion it was hard to determine, sent them both into the wall behind, and Judal’s face turned to a wicked grin as he beheld Hakuryuu’s countenance. 

“Not for money, then,” Judal said. “I knew it. You’re too prideful for that. So tell me, Hakuryuu, why hide your function along with your magic? What’s the purpose here, the method to your madness so to speak?”

Hakuryuu took several breaths to calm himself but did not loosen his grip. “I hired you to be my eyes and ears in the slums. Nothing more, nothing less. But surely you must be clever enough to put together what I’m having you monitor. A Chinese trading company that bears my name? A criminal organization that deals in matters all the way to the crown?” He here feigned the delicate cough he had so demonstrated upon hiring Judal. “My mother would never expect her most fragile child might be planning to strike her down lower than even I have fallen. No one expects the cripple.”


	8. Unfamiliar Customs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for an anon who likes The Peach Blossom Spring, here's a drabble inspired by the prompt "Unfamiliar Customs"

Their travels for the day ended in a tiny village nestled in a mountain range that lay in a largely unmarked portion of the map. Hakuryuu carefully sketched in both the town and the mountains, noting the name in delicate brush strokes. They were well welcomed by an older woman, not the head of the village but clearly someone important, and she invited them to dine in her garden.

Lantern light played over their host’s courtyard, and the two took seats on cushions by a small pond teeming with fish. Their host brought tea first, then left to return with what appeared to be their main course- a bevy of wriggling, fat worms and a pair of skewers with which to eat them.

Judal stared at the squiggling worm skewered on the stick he had just been handed. “Nuh uh,” he whispered to Hakuryuu. “No way, no way am I eating this.” 

Hakuryuu elbowed Judal and whispered back. “Shh, don’t be rude!” Just the same, he was staring at his own worm with distrust and worry. “This is obviously some sort of custom here so we should just…. eat it….” 

Judal whined and glanced around. Their host smiled widely at them and made a ‘go on’ gesture. Stupid traveling the world. Stupid bug. Judal frowned and savagely bit the worm off his stick, chewing it up and swallowing it furiously. Surprisingly, he liked both the crunch and the gush of flavorful guts. Judal grinned. “Hey that ain’t half bad! Can I have another?”

Their host’s look of anticipation had turned to horrified embarrassment, however. “You weren’t… The bugs are supposed to be bait for the fish of the pond….”


	9. In the Walled City

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for EthanolMusket, with the prompt "Dystopian AU"

Hakuryuu’s senses are black market, his fingers contraband fished from bins of defective product. His mind is a whirl of augmentation and single-minded purpose. White Dragon. It’s a painfully obvious tag, but he doesn’t need to hide his identity that badly. Anyone who could put the pieces together is either an ally or someone he wants to know that he’s coming for them.

**“You know for someone who says he only cares about himself, you have an awfully strong sense of justice.”**

Hakuryuu’s got one flesh arm left, and to be honest, it suits him fine. He’s got a knack for tech, for understanding how lines of code and bits of circuitry branch out like roots of a vast tree. They knit with flesh like creeping vines, becoming one with his body as though they were always meant to be one. It’s faster than flesh, stronger than flesh, and every advantage is one he can use. 

**“I’m just doing what needs to be done.”**

The Black Sun. Not an adopted tag, but a given name: the most sophisticated, dangerous piece of cyber-terrorist software ever devised. The server he was developed in and written to fit in Hakuryuu’s backpack the night he fled his mother’s mansion. Oh, the dangers of technology’s increased portability. 

Nowadays he prefers to go by Judal, and that suits Hakuryuu just fine too.

**“So you needed to pull a Robin Hood and put in an order for increased rations before blowing the place sky high?"**

Sometimes Hakuryuu regrets his luck in stumbling upon a mostly intact android casing. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. What good is an AI if you can’t communicate with it? Nowadays, when he hears something in Judal whirring troublingly as he thinks over some devious scheme or another, Hakuryuu looks back with incredulity on his decision to jerry rig an unsupported, outdated entertainment droid to run an AI more sophisticated than even his best computers could support.

**“We eat those rations, too, Judal. Or, at least, I do."**

And everything is rationed in the Walled City. Food, water, knowledge, money, life itself… All drip fed to a clawing, crowded mass that lives stacked on top of itself in infinitum. The tenement Hakuryuu shares with Judal is maybe half the size of his closet back at his mother’s mansion outside the city: about wide enough for the two to sit side by side and still have elbow room, but not quite long enough for Hakuryuu to stretch all the way out. He sleeps sitting up.

The space is shared, too, by Hakuryuu’s gear: broken computers nursed back to life like birds with broken wings; dented cybernetic eyes and hands, unwanted by the rich but easy to repair and sell to the hobbled people of the City; and his jar of experimental nanotech, which has a glorious, bloody future inside the bodies of his enemies. 

**“Does this have something to do with those Eye of Amon fucks?"**

Hakuryuu somehow always forgets how _warm_ Judal is, how his overclocked innards heat his metal and silicone shell until he’s almost too hot to touch. The weight and heat of him is a comfort on Hakuryuu’s back as his fingers undo the straps of Hakuryuu’s jackets, dressing him down to underclothes, down to humanity.

**“Alibaba and the others have nothing to do with my choices, Judal."**

In a way it seems natural it would end up like this, that he’d fall for something even more machine than he is. Whenever one of Hakuryuu’s metal legs malfunctions and sends him staggering over trash and rats, he spirals into worry about when Judal’s body will eventually give up on running such demanding software. Judal laughs off his concerns. They can upgrade then, he jokes as he follows Hakuryuu’s instructions to repair the failing leg. They’ll get him a body that’s more in fashion. 

Judal is a quick study at repairs. At everything really. It’s what he was made to do.

**“Hakuryuu, you know I don't give a damn about your motivations. Just or unjust, gentle or cruel, just lead the way, and I'll follow so long as you give me my freedom."**

****The Black Sun and the White Dragon. Two products both born of his mother’s machinations, both ready to strike her down from her tower if it means crumbling the entire Walled City around them.

**“Then why do you ask so many questions?”**


	10. Blackmail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for yucc, with the prompt "blackmail"

“So you know all that,” Hakuryuu said heavily. “What I did to my mother, the things I can do that no other man can manage… Why tell me all this?”

The man with the bags under his eyes… No, he had a name. Judal, was it? Judal, with the heavy makeup and the dark bags, smiled like a lazy cat. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m blackmailing you.”

Hakuryuu sucked in a sharp breath. Ah. So that was his game. He would hold knowledge of Hakuryuu’s crime and magic over his head, bleeding him dry for every penny of his mother’s fortune. Hakuryuu clenched and unclenched his fists, wondering if he could kill this man without being found out.

“How much?” he spat.

“How much?” Judal laughed, wagging a finger. “Oh, oh no, I want something way more exciting than money.” Now he jabbed that finger straight into Hakuryuu’s chest, right over his heart. “You.” 

Hakuryuu’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

Judal’s lazy cat’s grin widened at Hakuryuu’s suspicion. “I have an important function I must go to, and I really should bring along a date… How about we start there?”


	11. Happy Birthday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally written for NocturnalBoys, with the prompt "birthday"

The Mofall Motel proved a better temporary home than either of them expected. By the week, cash up front, and staffed by people so inattentive that Judal probably could have dragged a dead body through the lobby and not turned a single head. Not, of course, that they were planning on leaving any more corpses behind. No, no, the one back home had been quite enough. 

It’s spring, and Hakuryuu leaves early to go on a grocery run. Judal’s still half asleep when he goes, blinking bleary eyed and fumbling for his binder in the sheets when Hakuryuu gently pushes him black down into the pillows and tells him to _Get some sleep, Judal._

Hakuryuu comes home to a kitchenette in crisis. He’d thought he could trust Judal alone for one morning while he ran around on an important errand but instead….

“Yo, Hakuryuu, what’s in that bag?” Judal asked, looking up from a meal of skettios that seemed to be more splattered on the stove than it was in his bowl. 

“I thought… I mean….” Hakuryuu took a deep breath, dragging a hand down his face. It was so ridiculous he couldn’t help but laugh. “What the hell did you do to the kitchen? No wait, don’t answer that.” He set the grocery bag down and pulled out a small peach pie and a pack of candles. “Happy birthday, you big disaster.” 

Judal raised an eyebrow. “Holy shit. It is my birthday today, isn’t it?”


	12. Deities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 3 Sentence AUs- Deities for anonymous

In antiquity there was a sorcererous creature so greedy for power it conspired to devour the sun’s and bathe the world in an eternal eclipse.

“Stop making trouble and come to my side, Judal,” said the moon, who was known to some as Hakuryuu and knew this creature well enough to regard him fondly instead of as a vicious beast. And Judal, surprisingly enough, came, and still is by Hakuryuu’s side today, making the light of the moon ebb and flow like a tide upon our world.


	13. Ghost Hunters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 3 Sentence AUs- Ghost Hunters for @setsuntamew

“Just hold the camera steady,” Judal says to Hakuryuu, backing up to stand over the witch’s gravebed. “Okay, and three, two, one- we’re here at the burial ground of Goody Niles, who was stoned for witch craft in- come on Hakuryuu, I said to hold the camera steady!” 

When Judal turns around to see what Hakuryuu is staring at, however, he’s the one who screams.


End file.
